Recently, via some blog, tweet or other ripple in the internet
stream[1], I came across The
Presentation - a free book by Andrew Abela on extreme
presentations. It's a short and breezy book that outlines a
particular style of doing presentations[2]. I
liked the approach he outlines. I think it's worth a look if you are
interested in presentation technique and particularly if you are
giving a presentation in order to persuade a small group to take an
action.

That latter point points to the essence of this technique. He
makes the argument that there are two styles of presentation: which
he refers to as ballroom and conference room presentations. Ballroom
presentations are for large audiences where the concepts from
slideology and presentation zen fit in. His focus is instead on the
conference room presentation. where "what you are trying to do is
convince a small number of people to make a specific decision and to
take a particular action". He characterizes this as taking people
from a current situation to a preferred future situation.[3]

For these conference room style talks he outlines a
narrative format and media usage. The narrative format is a guide to
how to structure the talk, it's based on story telling - in
particular the notion of a story as a sequence of tension-producing
problems and their resolutions. He uses the SCoRE acronym to remind
us of this. You first lay out a Situation - a non-controversial
statement of the current state. Next comes the Complication - a
problem with the current state that leads the audience into the
argument. That complication is then matched with a Resolution and an
example that illustrates the pair. You then repeat the
Complication-Resolution-Example cycle several times (repeating
the CoRE, but you only use the Situation once).

The point of the example is both to provide a concrete case for
the audience to latch onto and to pace the rhythm of
complication/resolution, which otherwise would be jarring.

Although he doesn't say this in the book, it struck me that there
are often two phases overlaying the repeating CoRE cycles. The first phase
of cycles lead you to the solution that you're proposing the group
should decide on. Each cycle is a step leading you to that solution.
Once you've reached there, the following cycles are about raising
objections to that solution and answering them.

For media usage, he does not recommend using projected slides at
all. Instead he recommends printed slides - and slides that contain
a lot of detail. Each slide should have an easily grasped overall
structure, which he explains as passing the squint test - you should
be able to squint at the slide and immediately recognize its overall
structure. But within that clear structure there can be lots of fine
print. He says you should only use a few of these slides and talk
through them. The detail is there to provide the evidence that backs
up your narrative. The detail is the reason you shouldn't project
them, since slides don't do well with lots of detail. One slide will
typically support several CoREs.

Slides designed for printing like this are natural handouts and
the idea of going through printed material together reminds me of
when I attended Tufte's lecture where he used his books as his
visual aids rather than projecting anything.

Finally he indicated that once the presentation was over the
presenter should answer questions from the audience and then back
out of the conversation as the audience discusses the content.

I was initially put-off a bit by the form of the book, since it
takes a cheesy story form: a student needing to do an important
presentation going to a wise professor for advice. But the story is
kept very minimal and the book focuses mostly on the advice,
avoiding the usual trap of education wrapped in third-rate fiction.

Reflecting on this I'm inclined to compare it with another
approach I read about for similar kinds of presentations. I read
about this alternative from someone in the US military (but can't
remember the source). He railed against conventional
PowerPoint-driven presentations and instead argued that you should
provide a short prose handout (one or two pages) that everyone was
expected to read before the meeting. The meeting would then focus on
the discussion of the analysis and recommendation from the handout
with the "presenter" mainly there to answer questions that weren't
clear from the handout.

Notes

1: Almost certainly via Jason Yip, who is a
one-man torrent of interesting links.

3: I like the notion of thinking about different styles of
presentation and how this leads to different ways of approaching
them. I do, however, think there are more than two styles out
there. In particular the kinds of talks I give do not fit neatly into
either of these two forms.

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